The business world now knows that digital transformation is no longer a hype word; it’s a necessity for relevance and survival; if you fail to digitally transform your business, you will be kicked out of the market. Notwithstanding that businesses have seen how important digital transformation is and are embarking on different digital transformation initiatives, it’s sad to note that the failure rate is still high.
According to a 2020 study by Boston Consulting Group, a surprising 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail. One major factor responsible for this high failure rate is that some businesses see digital transformation as the integration of new apps and nothing more.
They fail to understand that it’s a holistic project that touches every facet of the organization, with employees as the bedrock for its success. Depending on how flexible your organizational culture is, employees may resist any attempt to change the way “we have been doing it,” which can be unhealthy for your digital transformation project.
Employees are wary of any change to the processes they have acquired from the period of onboarding and over the years. A change means that they will have to go through training sessions and maybe afraid of failure with the consequences of being laid off.
Most times, the next line of action will be to resist such changes, however, with software enablement, you can easily overcome such scenarios.
Why do you need software enablement?
Any time your organization wants to embark on a digital transformation initiative, employees have to go through organizational change; it’s more like a new onboarding process. It’s more or less as if they are new employees that must go through all the various complex elements your organization requires to fine-tune them into achieving the expected responsibilities of the organization.
This new onboarding process cuts across departments and introduces employees to new knowledge, and it’s time involving, regardless of the number of years an employee may have put in. The training sessions will take a lot of input from employees; the change is the new know-how of your organization, but all the information can be packaged into software, and that’s why you need software enablement for your employees.
Benefits of software enablement to digital transformation projects
Digital transformation takes its toll on both the organization and employees; everybody must contribute greatly for the project to succeed for the overall good of the organization. Leveraging software enablement, the organization can reap some of the following benefits:
1. Reduction in training time
Software enablement means that employees can on their own go through training sessions; usually, the organization needs to map out time for employees to have training sessions even when employees don’t feel comfortable with such arrangements and may put up resistance. By providing software and ensuring software enablement, employees can in their leisure take time to update themselves on the new apps and necessities for the digital transformation project.
Software enablement also means that an employee does not need to constantly look out for people to explain one issue or the other about the project. This comes to a head in the kind of situation the world found itself during the COVID-19 scourge; even where an employee needed to reach out to some colleagues to sort out some difficulties, it became practically impossible due to the measures and policies put in place to fight the scourge.
An employee that has software enablement can ordinarily key into the different apps necessary for the success of your digital transformation project without the need to go through training sessions. This can be done at the employee’s leisure; you will completely remove the fear that comes with failure from employees, which leads to resistance to digital transformation.
2. A means of high collaboration
What makes employees productive is the level of collaboration they have with others; since a digital transformation project can be likened to onboarding new employees, the level of communication must be at top gear. Employees tend to react to how positively, or negatively they feel from your organization’s communication standpoint.
Software enablement enhances employees’ learning experience to become engaging and ensures tailoring to specific needs that will ultimately improve customer experience. If employees don’t have the means to communicate, this can jeopardize the organization’s effort.
It is crucial to the survival of your organization to ensure that your digital transformation onboarding process will eventually promote employee engagement, retention, higher learning, and customer satisfaction.
Software enablement enhances the opportunity for employees to overcome remote onboarding challenges, since the employee is passing through another different onboarding process that digital transformation has brought to bear, the volume of information that employees need to digest may be overwhelming. But with a software enablement program in place, employees will not be submerged under this “landslide” new information.
Why do you need to organize a forum for employees to grasp information they can easily acquire through micro learning? Considering that you can even have employees who operate from different geographic and time zones, software enablement will help to harmonize training and ease out the stress employees have to go through to acquire new technological knowledge you need to improve customer experience.
3. Comprehensive understanding
Even in a normal setting, employees who attend training sessions may still have the need to revise some information they have been given to increase their performance; this can handicap the digital transformation project if they are not able or willing to reach out to instructors. A digital transformation project may involve hundreds of new apps you need to integrate, and it may constitute a herculean task for employees to readily understand their workings; a software enablement program can, however, resolve this problem.
Why this is possible is that a software enablement program ensures that employees are constantly with records of sessions they have gone through and can constantly refer to the videos any time they experience challenges. They don’t need to ask their colleagues for help in resolving issues; this imposes a lot of confidence in an employee’s ability.
Conclusion
Digital transformation is just like an onboarding process for most employees; a lot of processes in an initiative are new and may pose restrictions to employees. There must be an effective communication plan, which software enablement may enhance to counter these restrictions.
